18 July 2007 11:45 AM

Every so often, some Chief Constable or other appears in a silly hat, to tell us that terrorism is now so complicated that the police need to lock people up without charge or trial for months.

I am unlikely to get the chance myself, but the next time this happens, could those journalists present stop being overawed by uniform, remember that these characters head the most ineffectual and useless police forces in British history, and please ask them, in detail, exactly how this logic works?

I don't see it myself. It doesn't appear to me to follow. We arrest people on suspicion of wrongdoing. If they have done something wrong, it won't take 90 days to produce enough evidence to lay a charge. It's the preparation of the arrest that takes time, during which you can in any case keep suspects under such surveillance that they will not be any risk.

And, seriously, is a person who has been arrested and then released much use as a terrorist after that anyway? Is he just going to wander off back to his bomb-making cell and resume stirring the chemicals?

What does follow is this, as it has since the beginning of human freedom. If you give the state the power to lock people up without having to prove a case, the state will use that power - often in ways that were never predicted when it was given. That means that all off us are significantly less free, to speak, or write or think. Most modern tyrannies have come to power using such laws, which were drawn up for quite different purposes. Article 48 of the Weimar constitution was never supposed to help Hitler. But it did.

Which is why every serious Bill of Rights contains a clause banning this sort of arbitrary power and why the great Habeas Corpus Act was passed (in that case, to stop the Stuarts using the Channel Islands as a sort of Guantanamo Bay) .

There is no 'delicate balance' between liberty and security. You can be quite free and reasonably secure. You can be quite unfree and hopelessly unsafe. Liberty always comes first. If the police are too incompetent to find and formulate charges against real terrorists in 24 or at most 48 hours (and that, in my view, is stretching a point) then sack the officers involved and find new ones who can do the job.

If we were at war, what would we be fighting for? Why, for liberty, and one of the best safeguards of liberty is a set of stern, unalterable laws banning the government from locking us up when it feels like it.

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The end of the alleged Tory lead in the polls is being put down to a 'Brown Bounce', an odd phrase if ever there was one. I suspect it is more negative than that. Anthony Blair was a lot more unpopular in the country than many in the media realised. A significant number of people found his phoniness unpersuasive, and were glad to see him go, so glad that they returned to Labour allegiance as soon as he was gone. .

Many on the left who loathe the Iraq war are convinced (almost certainly wrongly) that Gordon Brown was secretly against it too, and have returned to Labour from political exile on those grounds. Mr Brown has cunningly encouraged these beliefs by appointments such as that of Lord Malloch Brown, who may have slightly exceeded his role as The Prime Minister's anti-war fig leaf at the weekend. I don't think his Lordship will do that again.

But above all I think the Grammar School fiasco put an end to David Cameron's strangely charmed political life. It did so because it told several important truths about the Tory Party. That it remains irreconcilably split between traditionalists and liberal 'progressives', and that the split will not heal. It reminded them that Mr Cameron himself is definitely on the liberal side of that split, that he is inexperienced and intolerant, and that he is a son of privilege who has little clue how most people live. He had sort-of survived 'Hug a Hoodie' and 'Let sunshine win the day', but this argument took us back to the dreary dank wastelands of normal bread-and-butter politics. The bread was stale, the butter rancid.

And that did it. For some time, Mr Cameron had been like one of those cyclists one sees in London who cannot bear to admit that they have stopped. They are much preferable to the ones who ride through red traffic lights, because at least they observe them.

But instead of putting one foot on the ground and waiting for green, they writhe and twist as if infested by savage biting insects, doing anything to keep both feet on the pedals and to maintain their balance. Sometimes, they manage to stay like this until the light changes. Sometimes they have to give up. For all I know, Mr Cameron actually does this. I have yet to see him at a traffic light. But the moment when they abandon their attempt to stay up is a pretty hard one. People tend to laugh.

And of course Mr Cameron has lost his balance, quite delightfully, in the Ealing Southall by-election. Perhaps, despite all, his candidate Tony Lit will win. But if he does, he will never be able to enter the House of Commons without people waving chequebooks at him, and asking him if he is sitting on the right side of the house.

The revelation that Mr Cameron's star signing had, only weeks before, been consorting with the enemy and giving them large cheques (just under the limit above which they must be declared) is one of the funniest things I've seen in decades of watching British politics. And it is funny -once again - because it tells an important truth. Mr Cameron is empty. He doesn't mind how he wins or who he wins with. If Mr Lit becomes an MP, he will represent nothing but political ambition, a desire to be in office under any conditions. This isn't an engaging, impressive ruthlessness, like that of Alastair Campbell. Campbell, for all his many faults, always believed in his bitter cause. It is just sad and silly.

Now, all you slow learners who derided me when I said the Tories were finished, years ago, isn't it time for a bit of reflection? If they are finished, what is the conservative, patriotic cause going to do? One more heave? It won't work, you know.

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On the question of single mothers, it is quite clear that the enemies of marriage will personalise this matter whatever anyone does. The person who suggests the re-establishment of marriage will find himself personally attacked in one way or another and accused of absurd prejudices.

The only response to this will have to be courage and resolve. I really do think that the British people, presented with a political movement that knows what it fights for and loves what it knows, will brush aside the silly diversions advanced by the anti-marriage lobby.

So many of the things we see, from mass drunkenness to the erosion of discipline in the schools and the sheer nastiness of so much behaviour in public places, have their roots in the collapse of authority and security in the home. This can only be provided by stability and continuity, and a clear knowledge of what is right and what is not being taught, by precept and example, from the earliest age.

Of course it's true that our society, where the better-off have abandoned the worse off to a moral chaos that only the rich can cope with, the figures on marriage are skewed. So what? Is that an argument against making marriage easier and indeed more desirable for the poor? Absolutely not. Of course those who choose married stability will generally have advantages to start with. We have created a terrible wasteland of moral poverty, which the Polly Toynbees among us seldom recognise, in their obsession with material poverty.

The difficulty is in recreating a society in which the poor will once again desire married stability, and be helped to attain it.

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17 July 2007 3:52 PM

Every so often, I’m asked to give advance notice of any broadcasting I'm doing. Generally this is difficult because I do not get very much warning myself. But as of today (Tuesday July 17th), I expect to be on the panel of BBC Radio 4's 'Any Questions' on Friday July 20th. The 50-minute programme goes out live just after the 8.00 p.m. news, and is repeated on Saturday after the 1.00 p.m. news. After transmission, it can be heard on the web. As with all such arrangements, it is subject to change at short notice. At present, other panel members include Dominic Grieve, the Tory frontbench MP, and Julia Neuberger, the Rabbi and Liberal Democrat peer. For some time after that, I shall be away, so I would ask contributors to carry on the discussion in my absence. I will try to reply to comments when I return.

First I'd like to respond to some comments on my MMR posting. Steve Johnson urges me to spend time with 'real scientists' rather than indulging in 'idle speculation about state conspiracies'. I'm not aware of having indulged in any speculation, idle or not, about state conspiracies. And scientists, above all people, know that it is impossible to prove a negative - so assertions that it is ' proven' that there is 'no link' between this injection and bowel disease or autism are unscientific in themselves. That's why I highlighted Vivienne Parry's much more reasonable and sensible statement, on the possibility of a link affecting a small number of people. What if you were one of them?

So far as I know, no study has ever sought to establish, using controls and such like, if there is such a link. Researchers have trawled through existing figures, gathered for a different purpose, looking for a statistical correlation and not found it. This doesn't answer the concerns of people such as Heather Edwards, who find persuasive circumstantial evidence that there might be a link.

As for 'conspiracies', that's your word. I have written elsewhere about the misleading use of this word to conjure up a picture of a fantasist with persecution mania, crouching at keyholes. It's a low trick in debate, designed to divert attention from the argument and turn it against the person. Conspiracies do happen, if you mean private gatherings of people agreeing to pursue in public (but without acknowledging their joint enterprise) a coordinated course of action. In modern Britain such things generally go by the name of 'lunch' though to my certain knowledge they also happen over dinner tables. But I never used the word, or anything like it. If my description of the strange letters I received conjured up the idea of such a conspiracy, that's your affair. I only described, with cold, complete accuracy, what happened.

John Chivall moves from the assertion that Wakefield's claim remains unproven by research, and that there is a 'consensus' against it, to describing it as a 'lie'. He uses terms such as 'deceiving' and 'cynically exploiting'. I am really not sure how the MMR-sceptics in the medical profession have benefited, financially or professionally, from taking this position. Nor do I think there is any evidence that they sought to do so. Again, the language is strangely harsh and intolerant. If you think they're wrong, say so. But why attribute low motives? Even if they are mistaken, it is possible to be honourably mistaken.

'Kenny' asks if people would prefer an autistic child or a dead one? This sort of thing does make me wonder if people are paying attention at all. The diseases prevented by MMR are not, in general, life-threatening. Deaths from measles, in their thousands before World War One, fell for many decades before the introduction of the original single measles vaccine ( which most MMR sceptics would be happy to give their children, if they could) in 1968. After that, they dwindled almost to nothing - as they might have done anyway without the vaccine. Nobody can be sure but the trend had already been downwards, almost certainly due to clean water, better housing and better nutrition. That is why, Mr Johnson, Measles is a killer in the Third World and not here - because hunger, filth and squalor turn it from a minor affliction into a major danger. Yes, it can in rare cases lead to encephalitis, but these are extremely rare and would hardly be reason for inoculating an entire population.

The MMR zealots' constant alarmism over measles is one of the main reasons why I continue to mistrust them. If they were confident of their case, they wouldn't need to scare people in this way. Nic Clarke asks about mumps. Please correct me if I am wrong, but mumps in children seldom has any serious complications or effects on fertility. But if there are such epidemics, I believe they could almost certainly have been avoided by the provision of single vaccines when doubts first surfaced after the MMR. I have always thought the official response to public doubt was foolish as well as bullying. The state in a free country is supposed to serve us, not order us about, as Colin Merton rightly points out. That is the real point of this whole argument. Would the MMR defenders prefer to live in a country where dissent was punished by law, and injections could be given compulsorily to children, whatever the wishes of the children's parents? I do hope not.

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10 July 2007 4:07 PM

No, of course they won't. It's too difficult and dangerous. They would be smeared, if they did so, as haters and persecutors of 'single mothers'. This wholly false, and in fact absurd, accusation is invariably made against anyone who stands up for marriage, and is equally invariably believed by large numbers of gullible people, many of them supposedly intelligent journalists. Often this is because they are afraid of being on the receiving end of the same intolerant persecution that will be visited on the person who has dared to speak in favour of marriage. The only way to challenge it would be to have the guts to be unapologetic about it, and the Tories just aren't like that. Wait and see, if you don't believe me.

As a result, they will not address the actual problem which they claim to be dealing with. Lifelong marriage and cohabitation cannot just exist peacefully side by side. They are two exclusive and mutually hostile ways of life, and one of them must eventually come out on top. My bet is on cohabitation. Why can't they live together? Because custom, manners and laws cannot possibly suit both at once. Our existing moral and legal climate is heavily biased against marriage, and as a result marriage is rapidly disappearing. It will soon be seen as rather rude (I suspect) even to ask if someone is married, in conversation or on an official form. The invention and amazingly rapid adoption of the term 'partner' has been designed to make this change more rapid .How long before people whisper behind their hands "Do you know, I believe those two are actually.....married?" How long before children are victimised in playgrounds because their parents are married?

As usual in important issues, there's a choice of evils here. If we returned to lifelong marriage as the standard, and to the severe discouragement of sex and parenthood outside marriage, some people would no doubt suffer unjustly. I refer to lifelong marriage because, for most people, that is the form the bond took, in practice, before the Harold Wilson/Roy Jenkins government democratised divorce in the Divorce Reform Act of 1969. There doesn't, in reality, seem to be any middle ground between lifelong marriage and marital chaos, especially from the point of view of children. They can exist together for a while, but not for long.

Before 1971, when that Act took effect, divorce was a rarity outside a small layer of rich people. After 1971 it became common, verging on normal (this was so in the USA. almost simultaneously with what was happening in Britain).

And, once marriage becomes easily soluble, there's that much less point in getting married in the first place. So from widespread divorce you move quickly to even more widespread cohabitation, so divorce diminishes because it isn't needed.

To return to the evils and injustices that arise when marriage is the norm, the worst is probably the stigma attached to children born out of wedlock. Personally, I think it revolting that illegitimate children should be punished for something that's not remotely their fault, but I know people who have experienced that wounding, cruel persecution, and I have to accept that it's possible that reviving marriage might revive that too, given the cruelty of school playgrounds. Social reformers should pay more attention to what happens in playgrounds.

Likewise, if you are only allowed to marry once, and the first time is a disaster, it's pretty tough to be told you cannot have a second chance. Though I would say that the common claim by divorce supporters, that lifelong marriage traps people in abusive relationships, is false. Anyone is free to leave an abusive relationship. What they then cannot do, under rules which insist that marriage is lifelong, is remarry. In fact, before 1969, such remarriages did happen and were often happy, though they were rare. But I think it was quite right and reasonable for such second marriages not to take place in Church, but only as civil ceremonies. The Church has to stand for absolutes, since nobody else will. And if it doesn't take its own vows seriously, then it cannot be taken seriously. This is of course very hard on religious people (and on them alone) who marry unwisely. But half my point here is that perfection isn't possible, and that there is often a price to pay for things which are desirable.

The problem with single parents, as they are now called, is different again. In my book 'The Abolition of Britain', I describe how charities which once sought to help unmarried mothers and their children cope with life in a society where marriage was normal, switched their aims in the 1960s. They began, instead, to campaign for a change in the status of unmarried mothers. And one of the things they wanted was to get rid of the expression 'unmarried'.

Why? Well, partly they wanted to be bracketed with more socially acceptable (in those days) groups such as widows and deserted wives, whose single status had been forced on them by death or by the callousness of others. This worked brilliantly. I was once told off by a leftist charity boss, for being 'prejudiced' against single mothers. He took on a very severe tone, and said that he was the child of such a mother. Given his age (even older than I am) I expressed surprise at this and asked what life had been like for him in 1950s Britain as the child of such a severely stigmatised household. And he then revealed that his mother had in fact been widowed.

Does the distinction matter? Yes, in a lot of ways. Motherhood is generally voluntary, since sex is generally voluntary, and it is a serious crime when it's not. That leaves out of account the availability of contraception and abortion, because I loathe abortion and fear that widely available extramarital contraception promotes promiscuity, but - despite my reactionary views - these things do exist in our society.

The decision to have a child outside wedlock was once a major one, and even if you don't think it is morally difficult, there is no getting away from the fact that it is significant. The widow and the deserted wife may be bringing up a child alone, but they didn't at any stage choose to do so. By the way, as a side effect of the sexual revolution, widows have officially ceased to exist in this country. In a scandalous development, the old Widow's Pension has been abolished and replaced by a short-term handout, for one year, and then by means-tested benefits which often penalise widowed women.

By mixing up voluntary and conscript single mothers, the campaigners blurred the issue. By fighting for benefits for all single mothers, regardless of these distinctions, they launched a social revolution. Personally, I don't think they had any idea how big it would be. But they did, deliberately, and with some courage and determination, fight for a deep social and moral change in our society because they thought it was just.

Now, about ten million tons of social research says that children are better off in stable marriages, in almost every single way you can imagine. The Duncan Smith Report confirms this. Anyone impartially surveying our society since the mid-1970s must conclude that there were many bad unintended consequences from weakening marriage. But do political and social conservatives show one tenth of the guts and application that the old leftist and liberal campaigners for unmarried mothers showed? They do not. Why not? We all say we love children, don't we? But we love ourselves too. My own guess is that - if surveys were taken of the happiness and contentment of adult parents - they would show that they benefited greatly from easy divorce and the collapse of the inconvenient restraints and obstacles of the marriage bond. That's why it's such a hard issue to raise.

Many conservative politicians in Britain and the USA appear to endorse marriage, as being better by far than the unmarried state. But they always couple this with a swift genuflection to the many wonderful single mothers who do such a good job, and insist that they have nothing against them, etc. They do this, although they never said they did have anything against single mothers. They do this, although they know that this is not the issue. They do it because they have implicitly accepted the argument that this is a matter of prejudice against certain individuals, rather than a moral stand in favour of a beneficial but often rather tough and demanding institution - marriage.

These are barely-coded messages, to say that they don't really mean it. These politicians have no intention of giving marriage the unique privileges and status it needs to recover and survive, and without which it will die. They will instead support 'families', whether married or not. And by doing so, they will continue to blur one of the most important issues that faces our civilisation.

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How would you expect a totalitarian dictatorship to arrive in a country which had been free for centuries? Well, exactly as it is doing, by slow, relentless salami-slicing of important freedoms. This process is made even worse and more repellent by the way in which people are persuaded, through fear, to support their own subjugation.

People seem to think that putsches will involve obvious, crude things - the tanks on the streets, the martial music on the radio, the loudspeaker announcements urging us to go quietly to our homes and observe the curfew, while the mass-arrest squads do their work.

We all know, or think we know, how we would behave under such conditions - rally to the resistance, refuse to be cowed, demonstrate in the streets and squares of our cities. Don't we?

Who knows? The problem with being free is that you get so used to it that you think it is the natural state of affairs, rather than a highly unnatural and unusual one, which can only be preserved by a huge amount of stroppy vigilance. So in fact wholly free people, such as the British have been for so long, are terrifyingly bad at standing up for rights which they cannot believe are threatened. People in horrible despotisms, on the other hand, often demonstrate what appears to be mad courage, inevitably ending in imprisonment, torture and death - because freedom for them is a beautiful idea, remote and perhaps impossible, but worth dying for.

What does this have to do with the Mumps, Measles and Rubella injection? More than I thought it did. Long ago, when I first began to write about the MMR controversy, I simply hadn't made up my mind about whether the injection was dangerous. Nearly seven years later, I still have no idea. And I have never, and would never, urge any parents to refuse to have their child injected with it, especially if they have studied the facts seriously and are happy about it. I haven't the medical knowledge. It would be irresponsible for me to do so.

My concern is with those who are troubled. Firstly, I am disturbed by the official persecution of those like Dr Andrew Wakefield who are nagged by a suspicion that there might be a connection between MMR and various quite serious childhood problems. Dr Wakefield might be wrong, and has never claimed certainty, but if by any chance he is right then this is a very grave matter, about which he was surely entitled, and in fact obliged, to make his concerns public.

Next, I am disturbed by the way in which the state turns a hard face towards those parents who choose not to have the MMR injection for their young. They are pestered with propaganda and badgered with scare stories about measles. If, despite being taxpayers whose stake in the NHS is as great as anyone else's, they ask for single injections instead of a joint jab, they are brusquely refused. There is no practical excuse for this. It would cost very little to do. It is the state telling them that their wishes must be subject to the will of power, like it or lump it.

Then I am unsettled by the authorities' resort to alarmist propaganda. In very rare instances, measles can lead to disastrous complications. In poor countries, where children are hungry and there is no clean water, it can easily be fatal. But in advanced civilisations such as ours, where hunger is extremely rare and clean sanitation universal, it isn't actually a big threat.

Yet the MMR lobby pretend that it is. They highlight very rare cases of deaths from measles - notably in a Dublin epidemic which actually followed the introduction of MMR there.

I traced, with some difficulty, the details of the Dublin deaths. One did involve a severely malnourished child, a shocking thing in a European capital at the end of the 20th century. The other involved a child with a severely malformed gullet and windpipe. What also emerged from my inquiries was the large number of children who caught measles despite having had the MMR, which suggests that its effectiveness is not as high as its supporters would like to think. In a more recent case of death by measles in Britain, the authorities flatly refused to give me any details of the case, hiding behind the usual unconvincing excuses of confidentiality - meaningless given that I did not seek the name of the child.

I also wrote in the Mail on Sunday about the curious fake letters, from mothers alleging that my supposed anti-MMR propaganda had led them to refuse to vaccinate their children, who had then been terribly ill and had almost died. These letters followed my attempts to get Gordon Brown and Anthony Blair to say if their sons had been vaccinated. I pointed out that these letters were unsigned, had illegible scrawls for signatures, or had incomplete addresses. And I then received a letter which was legibly signed, and appeared to come from a complete address. The letter was highly professional, beautifully word-processed, and wholly fraudulent.

The name of the person who signed it was stolen from a real woman. She, when I traced her, affirmed that she had not written it and that her children were in Africa, had grown up years ago, and had never suffered from measles. The address, which appeared to be genuine, was in fact a clever fake. The occupant of the flat which shared the postcode and number of the fake address had no knowledge of the letter. Had I not gone myself to the address, I would never have discovered these rather creepy facts.

So we have propaganda, state pressure on individuals, censorship, and the persecution of dissenters, plus the employment of untraceable, sinister and underhand methods against press critics. But imagine how much worse these things would be without the restraints on power imposed by the rule of law, the presumption of innocence, the freedom of the police from government pressure, the independence of parliament, the inability of the authorities to lock people up without trial, and a free press. And then examine the way in which all of these things are being undermined by government. How long will it be before parents can be forced to allow their children to be given jabs they object to? Unthinkable abuse of power? If only . Interestingly, in one case where an estranged mother and father disagreed about the MMR, a judge outrageously ordered that the child be immunised.

Now, why the rage against Andrew Wakefield who, on July 16th, faces a hearing before the General Medical Council( and the parallel rage against the admirable Angela Mason, the former teacher who went back to work with a hidden camera, to record the tragic disorder in state-school classrooms, and was censured by the atrocious 'General Teaching Council')?

I think it is a straightforward matter of the overmighty establishment (for the GMC is ostensibly independent) taking vengeance on someone who got in its way. In Sunday's 'Observer', we learned that two leading Cambridge academics privately suspect that MMR may be a factor in the development of Autism in a small number of children.

The official government line is that MMR is proved to be entirely safe. I have never been quite sure how anyone could claim such a thing, even on a much sounder research basis than the one the government uses. You would, in effect, have to prove a negative, which is notoriously impossible. But the 'Observer' report quotes an MMR supporter, Vivienne Parry, as saying a very interesting thing. "There's a small risk with all vaccines. No-one has ever said that any vaccine is completely without side effects. But we have to decide whether the benefits outweigh the risks. If we had measles, it would kill lots of children. If you have a vaccine, it will damage some children, but a very small number."

Ms Parry should be praised for her candour, a good clear summary of the view of the benevolent state. I suspect the government shares her view but hasn't had the nerve to say so.

But, apart from the fact that the dangers of measles have been greatly overstated, her remark raises the question of who comes first, the individual or a theoretical common good. Taken to its limits, the idea that some individuals must be sacrificed, or 'damaged' for the general benefit is a totalitarian one. But most of us don't mind it much because we don't imagine that we will be the ones required to make the sacrifice. That is why there need to be powerful safeguards able to withstand fashion and public opinion. And that is why Dr Wakefield, and people like him, need to be able to voice their doubts without facing the danger of serious censure by bodies such as the General Medical Council.

Put yourself in the position of Heather Edwards, who got in touch with me after a hospital mix-up caused the loss of valuable tissue samples from her small son Josh. I have written elsewhere about that side of the case. Josh developed serious bowel problems and regressive autism after his first MMR jab. Assured that there was no connection between the jab and the symptoms, on the reasonable grounds that because B happens after A, it does not mean that B is caused by A, Mrs Edwards gave permission for Josh to have his second MMR after the usual interval. The immunisation was given. His symptoms soon afterwards grew much, much worse.

Once could be dismissed as coincidence. But twice? It seems possible to me that Josh may be one of the small but significant number of children who react badly to the MMR. What if this is so? Are you happy for them to be sacrificed for the greater good? For Heather and for Josh, this is not just some distant essay topic. It is a miserable daily fact of life. Josh is now missing much of his bowel, as well as being deeply autistic. Doctors offer little hope or comfort of any kind, there is no real treatment or surgery which can make him better, and the task of caring for him, at home, is gruelling and dispiriting in the extreme. The physical details of his daily life - and that of his family - are frightful and appalling, and would drive most people mad with despair. Heather is tougher than that, but you will hardly be surprised to learn that she is an indomitable supporter of Dr Wakefield, and views his cause as hers.

If she and her son have had to make a sacrifice for the common good, or even if it is possible, then the very least that we can do is to make sure that she receives proper support and care for her son. Personally, I think the government needs to abandon its bullying tone and recognise that those who fear the MMR has damaged or will damage their children should at least be treated with courtesy and respect.

But I see no sign of it. And this brings me to my final point. I have visited a lot of tyrannies. And the thing I notice about them is not so much the obvious deadness of press and TV, the fear of speaking out of turn among intellectuals and journalists. These are bad, but in truth they affect very few people. What I notice is that in tyrannies, the poor and weak are utterly at the mercy of power. And this is the sort of society we are becoming.

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03 July 2007 4:14 PM

I have just taken a stroll along Haymarket, outside the 'Tiger Tiger' club, and noticed that a double yellow line adorns the highway at this point. Trivial, I know, and yet the following thought occurs to me. Once upon a time, the centre of theatregoing London was patrolled by police officers on foot, day and night.

These were men who knew their beat in detail and would instantly have spotted something odd, like a car parked on a double yellow line. Yet so far as I can gather, it was ambulancemen who actually noticed something unusual about the Mercedes. I'd add here that the earliest account I read of this incident, in the London 'Evening Standard' of 29th June, contains another detail I haven't seen in other reports of the event.

It quotes a bar worker saying " I have been told there was a Mercedes driving along Haymarket at around 1.30am when the driver swerved and hit some bins outside Tiger Tiger. The driver then got out and legged it. The bouncers had a look at the car and they found gas cylinders and nails in the boot. And that's when they called the police."

Since then a rather different version, of ambulancemen seeing gas filling the car, has become the generally accepted one. But what about the car hitting the bins, and the driver running away? If these things happened, mightn't they have caused an alert constable to act?

Luckily, it doesn't matter this time. For whatever reason, the car was discovered. And for whatever reason, the planned explosion didn't happen. But remember that this place is one of the most intensively watched areas on earth, thanks to a great multitude of Closed Circuit TV cameras. When I was making my recent programme on the assault on civil liberties, I visited an underground control centre from which such cameras were controlled. There's no doubt the area is intensively monitored. But those who watch the screens will not necessarily see or hear everything as it happens. That would be physically impossible. Nor, as they are not on the streets themselves, would they have any chance of bumping into witnesses who had seen something a bit strange, not strange enough to make them call 999, but strange enough for them to tell a passing copper

Did the operators notice the car, illegally parked, or the clumsy driver running away among all the other incidents of a Central London midnight? Were these things even picked up? Comprehensive as the coverage is, it cannot catch everything that happens. I wonder what the footage shows. The other car, interestingly, was towed away from Cockspur Street by parking enforcers who had no idea how dangerous it might have been - though they did notice the smell of petrol and called the police - after they had taken it away. So, while police deserve credit for their bravery in defusing the Haymarket Bomb, they did not actually spot either car. That was left to ambulancemen and parking wardens.

Why do I stress this? Because it increasingly seems to me that a return to proper foot patrolling would, in many ways be our best safeguard against terror - far better than stupid laws abolishing English liberty, or wasting yet more millions on ridiculous self-important organisations such as MI5, who (despite their laughable fictional portrayal in 'Spooks') appear unable to penetrate a wet paper bag, let alone an Islamist organisation.

Pc Plod would have spotted both cars in central London. Pc Plod, slowly, repetitively treading the streets of urban and suburban Britain, getting to know shopkeepers, petrol station attendants, the vendors of gas cylinders, nosey neighbours and the rest, would be quite likely to hear about the funny people who have moved in at number 94, who never have a barbecue but buy a lot of gas, who are visited at odd times by unfriendly types in Islamic dress; or about the strange bloke who recently bought several cans of petrol, but hardly drives. Why would someone like that want a big SUV anyway?

That's my plan for greater security, plodding, banal, boring old police work, getting to know a place and its people, so well that you notice when something is a bit out of the ordinary, listening to gossip that at first seems trivial but may contain the decisive clue. You could be grandiose (like MI5 and the 'security' correspondents who love to belabour us with jargon) and call this 'intelligence'. But I don't care what you call it. I think it would work.

Whereas I have never understood what connection there is between the things the government wants - more intrusive security services, more restrictions on law-abiding people, identity cards, detention without trial and the rest, and serious action against terrorists. I have yet to see any proof that our new security apparatus has ever predicted a serious terrorist attack, or prevented one - though it has picked up the occasional fantasists, and grossly inflated their importance. In one recent trial, a man was jailed for 30 years (originally 40 until it was reduced on appeal) for making plans in exercise books. They were wicked plans and his intent was villainous. But that was as far as he had got and I am by no means sure he would ever have got much further. In another case, an alert shop employee had reported strangely large purchases of weedkiller. What if he hadn't bothered? It was that alert citizen, not the apparatus of 'security' that achieved the breakthrough.

As for the response to the attack on Glasgow airport, I absolutely fail to see why cancelling dozens of flights, detaining passengers on their grounded planes, and forcing thousands of wholly innocent people to queue in the rain for hours did any good at all. On the contrary, it greatly increased the disruption caused by the attack. This is just trying to look effective, long after the event.

The same goes for the restrictions on vehicles approaching airports, introduced once more too late to do any good. Had it really never occurred to anyone before that airports might be targets, and that suicide bombers might drive up to them in cars? Well, of course it had. It was a matter of proportion. It just hadn't seemed worthwhile to do much about it, any more than most of us look up as we step out of our front doors each morning, to check that an eagle is not about to drop a tortoise on our heads

If one of your neighbours were slain by such a dropped tortoise, you probably would check the sky for a few days afterwards, but you'd know as you did it that the chances of it happening again were slight. Anyway, you'd increase your risk (already much greater) of being run down by a youth riding his bike on the pavement, as you looked up. These ritual responses just make life more miserable and inconvenient, without making it safer.They can even divert you from more important vigilance.

But what I really can't bear are the 'security correspondents', propagandists for more attacks on our liberty, prosing on with their jargon about 'clean skins' and 'Al Qaeda' and 'improvised explosive devices'. I have heard and read several of them claiming that the idea of putting explosives in cars is something that British-based terrorists have learned from Iraq. What garbage. The IRA were using car bombs for decades before Anthony Blair even knew where Iraq was. People do seem to have forgotten completely that we endured years of IRA terror, with very little increased 'security' and a great deal of sensible stoicism. Worse, people have started laundering the IRA's reputation. I recently heard a senior policeman say that the IRA 'gave warnings'. Well, sort of, and sometimes, but not so as to avoid killing a large number of people, including small children.

Anyway (and let us thank heaven for it) our home-grown Islamist bombers seem to have tried to make their supposedly Baghdad-inspired car bombs without any actual explosive, perhaps because they couldn't get hold of any. This could explain why they didn't go off. I don't know, but the absence of explosive, and of competence in general, in these recent attacks seems quite significant, and casts doubt on the claims about 'Al Qaeda' which we also have to put up with.

Now, if there really were such an organisation as 'Al Qaeda ', with its terrifying reach across the world, don't you think it might have been able to find some explosive for its operatives, if they were its operatives? Listen carefully to these experts and you will often hear them qualifying their use of 'Al Qaeda'. But that's always lower down the story. Always, near the top, they will intone that such-and-such has 'all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda'. What are these 'hallmarks', by the way? So far as I can work out, simply that the incident appears to be the work of Islamists and has a terrorist character.

They know (surely?) that there is no actual centralised body plotting these attacks, that the only uniting thread is an ideology, not a chain of command or even a source of cash. But it suits them to prose on in this way because it avoids having to explain what that ideology is, and what motivates it. It also makes them sound knowledgeable when they haven't really much of a clue. I noticed one of these geniuses once again parading his standard theory of British-born Muslims being trained in Pakistan and returning here to do their dirty work. Yet the alleged culprits of the current events don't seem to fit this pattern at all.

Part of the motive of the Islamist ideology which is the only thing that actually unites these terrorists is the West's perfectly correct past support for Israel. Another part of its motive is the West's more recent reduction of that support and its decision to put pressure on Israel to make territorial concessions. This policy change was brought about by a long campaign of terror, by the PLO and others. Concessions to terrorism breed more terrorism, for they show that it works.

Which leads me to another reason for there being so much terror in this country. This stems from the encouragement our government has given to every terrorist in the world by our abject surrender to the Provisional IRA. Anyone who wishes to alter our government's policies knows that its 'tough' rhetoric dissolves into compliance and negotiation, once they have hit us hard enough. I am always amazed that people still regard this disastrous collapse, a signal to all our enemies that we are vulnerable to violent pressure, as some kind of non-partisan triumph worthy of prizes and smiles.

And then of course there is the issue of Iraq, our role in the invasion and bloody war in that country, bitterly resented by Arabs and Muslims. To a lesser extent, though it will grow, there is also resentment of what is happening in Afghanistan, where each week brings more accounts of civilians being killed, mainly in American bombing raids. Might these things possibly lead unhinged, vengeful and murderous minds to do terrorist acts in Britain, rather than in countries not associated with the Iraq and Afghan interventions? It seems at least possible. In which case, the argument that we might block up the wellsprings of terror by intervening in Iraq and Afghanistan is not merely undermined, but actually reversed. And that is why the authorities are so reluctant to discuss it. How they prefer to claim that Islamists want to destroy us because they ‘hate our way of life'. And they may well do so. I don't like our way of life much myself, and my reaction to the drunken, debauched late-night streets of a British city is not far distant from that of a devout Muslim. But I do not imagine for a moment that bloody murder and bombs would make things better. Do Muslims? In most cases, I really rather doubt it.

If people in Britain really fear the increase of Islamic influence over our society, then they should be much more concerned about reversing the multiculturalism that has encouraged and enabled Islam to extend its influence here. They should be much more concerned about the mass immigration that is establishing Islam here as a significant force. Yet many of the neo-conservatives who rail against Islam are keen supporters of open borders and mass immigration. And they should be much more concerned about the collapse of our own Christian religion, which some supporters of the Iraq and Afghan wars belittle and attack. Do they really prefer Sharia law to the Sermon on the Mount? For this may be the choice they have unwittingly made.

Just in case anyone tries to avoid the arguments above, by claiming that my words are some sort of justification or excuse for terrorist acts, I should add the following. I hate terrorism with a passion. It poisons and corrupts every cause that adopts it. Only recently I was pointing out to an Israeli friend just how much Zionism had been damaged by the terror of the Stern Gang in the 1940s, and how much Israel has been damaged by the rise to power of former terrorists there, and its continued refusal to condemn, unambiguously, such events as Deir Yassin or the murder of Lord Moyne.

The cause of Irish nationalism, with which I have much sympathy, has also been gravely damaged by the resort to terror. A British patriot and an Irish patriot actually have much in common (I think the possibility of the two getting along together is beautifully, if fancifully, portrayed in Patrick O'Brian's wonderful historical novels about the profoundly British, Protestant Captain Jack Aubrey RN, and his close friend, the profoundly Irish Roman Catholic, Dr Stephen Maturin), and an immeasurable amount of good things has been lost in the sad war between our peoples. But, once terrorism seized the leadership of the Irish cause, the British patriot had to turn away, and fight in defence of his own.

I think I was prevented for many years from appreciating the justice of the Arab complaint against Israel, because that case was made only by men who preferred death and blood to compromise.

Great harm will be done to the cause of those of us who view British intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan as wrong, by terrorist murder or attempts at it, supposedly justified (as if grief at the deaths of innocents could be assuaged by the deaths of more innocents) by 'anger' at these things.

But that does not excuse silly attempts to make terrorism into a pretext for an attack on irreplaceable liberties; nor does it excuse an intellectual laziness which keeps us from examining the real nature of the problem, by churning out flannel about 'Al Qaeda' or the 'War on Terror'.